When an "openly gay, pro-choice, gun-owning, pro-death penalty, liberal,
voted-for-Reagan feminist" becomes a cause celebre in conservative circles
it tends to grab your attention. As it turns out, grabbing attention
appears to be something at which the former talk-radio host and former
head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women
(NOW), Tammy Bruce excels. Though ostensibly an argument about the
value of free speech generally, the book is more of a rousing polemic,
in which Ms Bruce, who was fired from a radio gig for making fun of Bill
Cosby's extra-marital escapades and denounced by NOW's national governing
body for drawing attention to the fact that OJ Simpson was a wife-beater
and a murderer, goes after her friends on the Left with a vengeance for
the way in which they stifle dissent both within and without. In
the process, she makes an irrefutable case that Political Correctness is
an exercise in hypocrisy by the Left, but fails to convince us that free
speech is an absolute good, particularly undermining her case by reference
to her own activism. But even if the book proves unequal to the task
Ms Bruce has set herself, it is nonetheless an alternately amusing and
troubling look at the close-mindedness of the Left; no wonder conservatives
like it.

As Ms Bruce surveys the sad recent history of Political Correctness
(PC) in the workplace, academia and elsewhere, she treads ground with which
many readers will be familiar. Much fresher and more engaging are
her discussions of how PC speech codes, either explicit or implicit, are
wielded within liberal activist groups. And the book is at its very
best when she deals with her own personal experiences, as when she stood
up to the rest of the gay community and defended Dr. Laura Schlessinger
against charges of anti-homosexual bigotry. During that dust-up there's
one extended passage where Ms Bruce is first invited to appear on a panel
discussion about Dr. Laura at USC, as the token "conservative", then disinvited
when the other panelists object to appearing with her, and finally she's
called and asked to not even attend the discussion. These types
of stories, and Ms Bruce has more than her share of them, give the book
an immediacy that it might lack if written by a Bill
Bennett or a John Leo.

Ms Bruce is intermittently perceptive about the causes and effects of
Political Correctness. For instance, assessing her banishment from
the USC panel, she writes that :

The Left implements speech and mind control because
they know they cannot persuade on the issues; silencing the opposition
becomes their only recourse.

And elsewhere she says that because feminists and civil rights activists
portray their constituencies as the "victimized", it is necessary to institutionalize
their victimhood. To acknowledge that minorities and women have actually
made progress in society might, after all, lead to a realization that these
Left-wing activists are not serving a useful purpose. But Political
Correctness campaigns perpetuate the cycle of "us vs. them" and continue
the illusion of victimization. In arguments like these, Ms Bruce
deftly exposes the cynicism of the Left.

Even more devastating is her assessment of the effects this kind of
politics has on the very groups it is supposed to be helping :

The sense of perpetual victimhood precludes even
the concept that the members of a victimized minority could actually rise
above
their assigned position in society and meet that
society on their own terms. To do that would mean taking personal
responsibility
for the condition of their own lives, instead today's
'progressives' have designed an argument that leads not to the encouragement
of personal change and growth but to entitlement,
group rights, and the eradication of the individual, all in the name of
progress.

That's pretty stern stuff; but a much needed dose of reality.

As opposed to this kind of "thought policing", Ms Bruce says that she
favors an almost completely "free" society :

[A]n environment of personal freedom, at all levels,
is the only hope the members of any minority have of being able to lead
their lives without fear. If you are not a
straight, white male, your lifestyle depends on a culture that does not
impose arbitrary
limits on thought or speech.

This is inartfully stated and it is here that she comes into conflict
with conservatism, which is understandable enough, but eventually she even
contradicts much of this herself, which suggests that perhaps she's just
not fully thought through some of her ideas.

As a threshold matter, she should have recognized that there is a significant
difference between the Left and the Right when it comes to the doctrine
of Free Speech. First, let us accept the Left's critique of Western
Civilization generally, that it is largely the product of European Christian
men, and of the American constitutional system specifically, that it is
the product of conservative wealthy white Christian men. It seems
obvious then that our culture is premised on certain absolute truths, some
revealed by God, others arrived at through human experience or scientific
experiment. It is, therefore, natural that in such a system there
will not be unlimited personal freedom. If nothing else, we have
long required people's behavior to conform to Judeo-Christian morality.
As to speech, the West has tended to allow almost all forms of political
expression to go unchecked, so long as the speakers do not actually advocate
the violent overthrow of the system, and even that is frequently allowed.
But there's no inherent reason why other forms of "expression"--pornography,
obscenity, and the like--should be protected; and they typically haven't
been.

On the other hand, the Left rejects the very concept of absolute truths,
believing instead that everything is relative, that all ideas deserve a
kind of coequal status, and that we are each free to pick and choose from
among them. For our purposes it is not necessary to rehearse the
reasons why this is dangerous, it suffices to say that this belief would
seem to require exactly the kind of unlimited freedom of which Ms Bruce
speaks. It is hypocritical and intellectually dishonest of the Left
to attack traditional morality on the basis that we can not know it to
be true, but then to turn around and insist that racist, sexist, or homophobic
speech should be suppressed. If we truly can not know the final cosmic
validity of any idea, then all ideas must be given equal protection.
If the Left is right in its advocacy of relativism, then both "2 + 2 =
4" and "2 + 3 = 5" are equally worthwhile statements and we have no means
of deciding between them other than through the arbitrary exercise of brute
political force, which violates their own philosophy.

All of this matters because minorities--women, Jews, blacks, etc.--have
achieved all that they have in the West while working within a system that
does in fact impose limits on people and where we, as a culture, make judgments
about the truth or untruth of what people say; Ms Bruce appears to be quite
wrong about the need for unlimited freedom. But it is important to
note that the limits that have been imposed are absolute limits, that have
been recognized for hundreds even thousands of years, that apply to all
men and women, that have served Man, particularly Western man quite well,
producing the freest, wealthiest, most scientifically advanced culture
on Earth. What the Left is trying to do, as Ms Bruce ably demonstrates,
is
to impose purely arbitrary limits to suit their own purposes. The
real problem apparently is not limitations as such, but the actual limitations
that the Left advocates.

Later in the book, Ms Bruce makes it clear that even she supports some
limitations, as she recounts two campaigns that she led as head of LA NOW.
In the first instance, she successfully sought to get booksellers to tuck
Brett Easton Ellis's by all accounts sadistic novel, American Psycho,
away on upper shelves within the store, rather than in displays out front
and on shelves where kids could reach the book. interview was eventually
abandoned. Now, these are eminently worthwhile projects, but they
are hard to square with the notion of unlimited free speech. In fact,
they reflect Ms Bruce's own understanding that we should have some moral
limits placed on public speech. In theory she may be with the hard
Left, but in practice she does appear to have more than a little conservative
in her.

This little bit of intellectual disconnect on the author's part is problematic,
but it does not mar the rest of what is a really useful and enjoyable book.
Ms Bruce's honesty is admirable and if she herself is still groping toward
her final political destination and still wrestling with issues like these
it merely adds an interesting tension to her story. For a conservative,
it is necessary to disagree with much of what she has to say here, but
much fun to watch her tear into the Left. Unfortunately, liberals,
who stand to benefit from what she has to say, are unlikely to read the
book, precisely because they do not readily tolerate dissent in the ranks.
That's their loss.

Websites:

See also:

Tammy Bruce Links: My Brush with the Campus Thought Police: Why is it conservatives are inviting a liberal Democratic feminist to speak on campus, and Democrats aren't? A report from two campuses. (Tammy Bruce, 12/02/03, Front Page)